Spiderman: unless I missed something, you still need to cut 3 cards. I have you at 63 right now. Everyone else has 60 cards or less, so as soon as you make those cuts, we can start up the new season of play.

Everyone is now at or below 60 cards in their pool, so I'm going to list the week 1 matches and everyone can begin as soon as their decks are ready. Remember that you can continue swapping free agent cards throughout the season, so don't hesitate to make a claim if you see a card you'd like to try.

I'd also like to start more discussion about possibly rotating cards out of the league (a.k.a. "retirement"). Two questions:
1) Who is in favor of creating a system where we force cards out of the league? IIRC, Melkor brought it up, but if everyone else thinks it's a bad idea, there's no sense in pursing it further.
2) Does anyone have any ideas on how to go about it? The most obvious method would be to rotate out any card that's been in an active pool for a certain number of seasons. That would be the most consistent method, I believe, but it would be a pain for me to track. It could also seriously hamper a player if the core of their deck suddenly disappears one season, so we would have to decide this far enough in advance so that everyone can plan around it. I also thought of a second method where after each game, the loser can vote for one card that was played from the winner's deck to move closer to retirement. I believe this would add to the competitive balance of the league by rooting out the most powerful / broken cards, though it would cause any shift in strategies to be extremely slow. I'd also need suggestions on how many votes would be needed before a card gets the boot.

On a (sort of) side note, I'd also like to keep the free agent pool as manageable as possible without actually pulling out playable cards. I was thinking of retiring any card that has been a part of that pool for five consecutive seasons. Anyone have any problems with that? Should the time limit be shorter? We have 142 free agent cards right now, so once the retirements start, we'll probably maintain a pool of 200 - 250 cards. Does that seem like a good number?

Finally...

Here are the match-ups for week 1 of season 4. Have fun and good luck to everyone this season!

I like retiring cards after they've been in a certain number of seasons - having the core of your deck disappear "suddenly" shouldn't be a problem since we all know retirement's coming up for that card (except if we implement it now ) However, if it's a pain for you to keep track of, it's probably not worth it.

We do the voting method and whichever card from each player's decks gets the most at the end of season is the one that gets cut.

About the free agent pool, retiring after 5 or x seasons is fine - if someone hasn't picked it up by then, no one probably will.

In terms of the free agents, 5 seasons sounds just fine (if not too long).

As for retirement, I think it should be more of a "Hall of Fame" situation -- we shouldn't lose staple cards (e.g., Giant Growth, Dark Ritual) or be penalized for taking a card in the draft for "future use" and have the clock run out. So I believe the clock on a card's career should only consider seasons in which it was used in the deck (seasons in which the card affected play in games). For instance, I drafted Leafdrake Roost in the initial draft, but haven't used it at all -- though at some point I would like to. On the other hand, I drafted 2 Ghitu Slingers in that same year and have been using those ever since, so they have accrued 3 seasons of use each.

I think there should be a time frame (say, 5 seasons again) determined for the "career length" of cards. At the beginning of each season, we can compile a list of cards that are entering their (potential) last season, so that nobody is blindsided by the loss of deck components. At the end of the season, then, each player submits a list of 5 cards they think should be "Hall of Famed." Cards that receive a sufficient aggregate ranking then get retired. The aggregate ranking can be determined from 10 points for a "1" ranking, 8 points for a "2," etc, with a retirement threshold set at 30 points or something. For instance, if three people think a Ghitu Slinger is the 2nd most retireable card and two people think it is the 4th most retireable, it has (3x8)+(2x4)=32 points, and it would be retired (well, one of them would be, anyway) at the end of that season.

We could potentially limit retirements to one card per player per year, to prevent wholesale annual destruction of decks. Additionally, retirement could be rewarded with an additional draft pick between the first round and the second round of the draft -- that player loses his final pick of the draft but gets an extra right near the beginning instead.

My thoughts are that common cards are fairly easy to pick up and replace... it may direct people to choose particular boosters for the next season, but then again, who knows why people choose boosters to begin with? I'm just like to see new cards in play which is why I chose Innistrad, but someone else may like older cards and choose Mirage.

I've noticed that Madness could become a strategy now that there's more cards having it and dealing with discard. I'm not saying people have chosen boosters for it to intentionally become a strategy but it's there.

But I also agree on cards "not being on the clock". So I like the idea of them being retired after x seasons of actual playing time in decks.

The voting thing sounds a bit number-crunch-ingly, but since it sounds like I don't have to keep track of it , that's fine too.

I updated the spreadsheet (for everyone but Spidey ) with free agent numbers (F#) to number of seasons each card has been in the pool. I won't be doing anything with them yet, just wanted to give everyone an idea of how many cards would be approaching retirement a few seasons from now. At the beginning of the next draft, I would increment each number by one and remove all cards with an F# of 4 (since cards enter the list at 0). Does this seem an equitable method for paring free agent cards?

Spidey: In response to your first suggestion, I personally don't like the idea of voting out one card from everyone's deck each season. I think it's best to maintain as much competitive balance as possible and it seems that having both the last-place and first-place players lose their best cards would hurt the last-place player more than the first-place player. I think we either need a method where cards are either rotated out over time or where the most powerful cards are dropped, regardless of which deck they reside. Or some combination of the two, such as in Rokapoke's idea.

Rokapoke: I'm fine with your idea, in so much as it's fair and covers all our bases and potential pitfalls. Cards get a minimum 5 seasons of play, it prevents wholesale losses in a deck and doesn't penalize new players or those with weaker decks. But it's going to be a LOT of work to keep track of not only when cards entered the league, but whether or not they affected game play each season. That basically means someone's got to go back through each game thread and note all the cards that are getting played. I was hoping to come up with a simpler solution.

Rokapoke: I'm fine with your idea, in so much as it's fair and covers all our bases and potential pitfalls. Cards get a minimum 5 seasons of play, it prevents wholesale losses in a deck and doesn't penalize new players or those with weaker decks. But it's going to be a LOT of work to keep track of not only when cards entered the league, but whether or not they affected game play each season. That basically means someone's got to go back through each game thread and note all the cards that are getting played. I was hoping to come up with a simpler solution.

I suppose the easiest way to implement it would be for each player to start tracking his own cards as of this season, and start the 5-season clock now (for retirement, that is). That way there is no need to dig through three seasons of results and all that.

I think the game play may be hard to track as I play different decks against different opponents. I like the retirement idea, but there needs to be an easier method.
Unfortunately I don't have one off hand.